The 2006 Sovereignty Referendum in Transnistria: A Device for Electoral Advantage

Abstract

On 17 September 2006, the leadership of Transnistria unilaterally held a sovereignty referendum, despite knowing it would not be implemented. It means it was driven by other motives than the reallocation of sovereignty. Drawing on a new suite of sources, including interviews with Transnistrian elites and Russian journalism, this paper argues that the primary motivation behind the poll was the desire of Transnistria’s President Igor Smirnov to domestically empower himself to gain the electoral advantage in the imminent presidential elections. The study also provides a framework of the motivations for calling of unilateral sovereignty referendums in de facto states.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Magdalena Dembińska and the anonymous reviewers for their support in improving this manuscript. The author also wants to thank the participants of the online workshop on unilateral sovereignty referendums in de facto states, Micha Germann, Tomáš Hoch, Markus Hoehne, Sergey Markedonov, Kamaran Palani, and Robert Rajczyk, for their comments on an earlier version of this paper.